DEATH DINES IN
edited by Claudia Bishop & Dean James
Eat, drink, and be murdered in this collection of 16 new stories.
Why is the sociopathic impetus toward violent death so often balanced in contemporary crime fiction by the domestic impulse to set a good table and provide the gentle reader with recipes? Whatever the reason, most of these dine-and-die anecdotes tend toward coziness, from Elizabeth Foxwell’s chronicle of Alice Longworth Roosevelt unmasking a German spy to the poisoned period Christmas dinners of Rhys Bowen and Anne Perry. Lyn Hamilton’s “Stark Terror at Tea Time” is ingenious but never, thank goodness, terrifying. Venturing closer to the hard edge, Meg Chittenden’s henpecked husband resolves to complete a luxury train trip without his wife, and Jeremiah Healy’s mobsters take their culinary cue from the ancient story of Thyestes. Mary Jane Maffini virtually and wisely ignores the foodie element in her cat-and-mouse tale of con artists meeting murder. But top honors go to the two stories—Carole Nelson Douglas’s well-plotted tale of how feline sleuth Midnight Louie interrupted a dangerous fugu dinner and cleared himself of raiding a koi pond and Donna Andrews’s hilariously demented anecdote of a birthday dinner with self-confessed poisoner Aunt Millicent—that best combine light and dark to explore the downside of feasting.
The rest of the contributions are summarized by Puzzle Lady Cora Felton’s niece Sherry Carter: “Somebody got killed, and because of the quiche you were a suspect, but aside from that it went great.”